Turning Japanese Part Two

I had originally intended to just put the following in a postscript to the last article on Lard Island News, but on reflection I thought it might be of some interest, when linked in with the last Oddcast, to just show you how I paint using the Army Painter dips and these are not a bad place to do that with. several people have got in touch, surprised that dipping is not the final stage in the process, so this very short piece should make all clear.

Here I wanted to ensure that the jump off points really stood out. With jungle terrain it is very easy to get anything lost on the table, so something clear was needed. I also, like most games I am sure, like the idea of having the Japanese rising sun flags on the table as they are terribly emblematic. However, adding a flag to a platoon sized force is a bit silly, so putting them on the JOPs is idea.

Here you can see that I have painted the flag in block colours. Having undercoated in black, I painted the flag grey first before adding the red and then the white. With that done, I repainted all of the kit black. That’s were we are at that stage.

With that done, I then painted all of the kit, again in block colours, before painting with dip.

For me, the Army Painter dip is not about providing highlights but rather giving depth to the shading. In the above photo you can see how the dip pooling around the kit is already doing that.

When the dip is dry, I thin highlight up. Here that process is pretty simple The red I did with scarlet paint, the white with neat white on the raised edges. I then watered down the paints with about 50% water and went over some less prominent highlights. The kit was all then highlighted with the odd touch of lighter colour. This is MUCH easier than any three stage colour process and these small highlights are there to suggest that the model is rather better painted than it really is. The Japanese script on the flags was added with a mapping pen, I had several period intelligence documents which tell me what many Japanese military words look like, I didn’t bother with that; all this stuff is utter gibberish. Looks alright though…

That’s it really. Nothing more to say. As always I will try to make things as easy for me as possible. Do I get results anywhere as good as la Roundwood? No, not a hope. But from 2′ or 4′ they look pretty much alright. The final Jump-off-Points are here: